On my last night in Horta there was a dinner party aboard Polaris, and then I performed the ritual every yachtsman follows before leaving Horta. I painted a golden harp on the harbor wall next to all the other yachts’ names and symbols, hundreds of them, including Chichester’s, that have accumulated there over the years. The next morning, September 4, I collected fresh bread and, particularly, banana bread from the Estalagem, gathered my gear together, and, with Len, rowed out to Harp. Len helped me deflate and stow the dinghy, had a last look at the electronics, and got a lift ashore. I started the engine, slipped the mooring, and motored past Polaris for a last shouted goodbye. I truly hated to go.
I motored through the harbor entrance, nearly in tears, passing the Pico ferry; everybody aboard waved goodbye. I unreefed the genoa, switched off the engine, and started to beat toward Pico in the fresh northeasterly. The seven-thousand-foot volcano was distinctly outlined against the bright blue sky, not wearing its usual crown of clouds. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never, not once, sailed Golden Harp single-handed.
I began to consider wintering in Horta.
18
Alone from Horta to Crosshaven
I began to tune the rigging — adjusting the shrouds until the mast was standing straight on both tacks, something somebody had told me how to do in Horta. It worked, and by the time I had finished, my initial nervousness at sailing the boat alone was gone. I began really to enjoy myself; it was a wonderful feeling of self-sufficiency.
Pico began to recede into the distance as we (I always thought of Harp and me as “we”) approached Graciosa. As night fell, I navigated from bearings on the many lights dotted about the island. We pointed toward the western end of Graciosa, taking a different route from the passage out, and I rested fitfully, coming up often to check my bearings. I would not really feel comfortable until we had cleared Graciosa and were in the open sea with no rocks to pile up on.
Our first full day out was sunny and clear, lovely sailing, but with the wind still on the nose and dropping. Late in the afternoon I sighted a ship and got my KVHF flags up in a hurry, something I was getting good at. She was the Polish merchant ship General Madalinski, and I got the usual warm reception from the radio operator, who agreed to send telegrams to the States and Ireland for me. The captain gave me a position which closely corresponded with my own navigation, a great relief, since that day I had done my very first noon position on my own. I spent the time reading and listening to the American Forces radio station at Lajes Field in the Azores, which was much like listening to a small-town American radio station. The news was particularly nice to hear, since I hadn’t read a newspaper or listened to the radio for more than two weeks.
I got my first good night’s sleep and awoke to find us nearly becalmed. I set the drifter and had to work all day at keeping the boat moving in the light airs. At my next noon sight we had covered only thirty-five miles, a discouraging figure, but shortly after lunch the wind swung around behind us and I was able to set the Betsy Ross floater spinnaker. The boat’s speed increased immediately from two to three and a half knots, more when the wind puffed a bit. Fred steered perfectly, the sun shone, and I had the best sailing I had ever experienced, lying naked on the deck with a glass of wine and soaking up the sun while Harp took care of herself. This was a totally sybaritic experience and was the time when I most wished I had someone to share the trip with. Randiness began to set in.
In the afternoon I contacted a Russian merchant ship, the Alexander something-or-other, and got the first cool reception in my experience with other ships at sea. They gave me a position and weather report but they didn’t seem too happy about it and, since I had sent telegrams the day before, I didn’t press them to pass on messages. They divulged that they were en route from Leningrad to Cuba and then signed off.
I went to sleep with the floater still up and woke at midnight to find that the wind had risen and the spinnaker had torn along the starboard leech. When I went to get the sail down, the deck lights shorted again and I had to do it in the dark. I was very sad about the spinnaker, since it had become my favorite sail. It was like seeing a good friend with a broken leg, and I folded it into its bag to await the ministrations of John McWilliam in Crosshaven.
Now I had day after day of free sailing. On the eighth I was making six to seven knots in ten to twelve knots of following wind when a very embarrassing thing happened — or, at least, it would have been embarrassing if there had been anybody there to see it. I got a bad spinnaker wrap; my Irish tricolor all-rounder wrapped around the forestay in the middle, while remaining full of wind at the top and bottom, giving the effect of an overengineered brassiere sticking out in front of the boat. I tried everything I could think of to free the sail, but it refused to unwrap and it began to look as if I would have to climb the mast to unwrap it from the top. It was mid-afternoon and I decided that since we were still making a good speed I would leave things as they were until it began to get dark. If the spinnaker hadn’t unwrapped itself by then, and I fervently hoped it would, then I would go up the mast and free it. In the meantime, a beer seemed a good idea. After all, I was in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and there was nobody there to witness my humiliation. Why not relax?
Five minutes later a Dutch naval vessel, HMS Zuiderkruis, turned up and, after making radio contact, the operator’s first words were, “Can we assist you in clearing your spinnaker?” I said I could handle it, and after getting a position and a weather report and ascertaining that they had picked me up on radar at a distance of five miles, I went on deck, shamed into climbing the mast. I waved goodbye to the ship and started up. After ten minutes of swearing and struggling with the bloody thing, it finally came unwrapped, and as the big sail filled I was startled to hear a loud cheer. I swung around to look behind me and found the ship stopped, her entire crew hanging over the rail, applauding. She gave a loud hoot on her horn and was on her way again. So much for privacy in single-handed sailing.
In the middle of that night I got a fine scare. I was sleeping like a stone when there came a loud thumping on deck. Pirates? I charged up the companionway ladder to find nothing. Then, as I was about to chalk the sound up to a nightmare and go below, the thumping started again. A small, needle-nosed fish had jumped into the cockpit and was thrashing about the floor. I caught him and returned him to the sea. I don’t know if I really rescued him, for at that moment a pair of dolphins appeared and started into the phosphorescent torpedo act again, and he could have made a midnight snack for one of them. I watched, still fascinated, until they departed, then crawled back into my bunk.
I settled into a deep contentment. I was comfortable, well fed, and doing what I had been planning for months. The nearest problem was eight hundred or so miles away, and I was enjoying my solitude and self-sufficiency. The only fly in the soup was that Harp had never stopped taking water, and as time wore on she took more and more. There was so much that it was impossible to isolate and tell where it was coming from.